Piano Suite VI: Theory of K 2008
Written for Music, Science and the Brain, an open symposium, Plymouth, Sept ‘08.
When I set about composing the pieces for the symposium I corresponded with the scientist and violinist, Dr Martin Coath, who had invited me to perform and who was also due to present a paper at the event. The correspondence was about the speed of synapses throughout the brain and became a main source for the music.
The chain of events in the brain where electrical impulses turn into chemical events and then pass from a nerve cell ending to leap over a space onto the beginning of the next nerve cell…this chain of events can happen very fast. Like many people, I prefer to travel slowly; life feels more comfortable when you know that the car you’re in can stop in time. So, to think that there are chains of events happening at more than 100 miles an hour inside our very heads...I took the information Dr Coath sent me and let it drive me to new music.
I started to perceive the electrical charges as if batons in a relay race, so began passing ideas along the chain of pieces like batons being passed along the chain of runners. In Part 5 "Drama at the axon terminal" I condensed the process - passing connections note on note, bar on bar.
At the time I was writing the music, a friend told me how her husband had woken from a brain operation with a vision in which he saw our civilisation as two humanities separated by a horizontal line he called K where K = Kindness. In the recovery room they devised a formula where salvation is defined by those who are above the line of Kindness pulling up those who are below it. Thus they developed their "Theory of K" after which the suite is named.
Part 1 Defrag
Part 2 Theory of K
Part 3 Thoughtfall
Part 4 Drama at the axon terminal
Part 5 Where is “me”?